Every Day’s a Special Day – Celebrate Them, Promote Your Business!

Did you know… 31st January is “Inspire Your Heart With Art Day“, it’s the day that in 1849 that the Corn Laws were abolished in Britain, in 1865 Congress passes 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery in America, its Backward Day, and in 1961 Ham the space chimp returns to earth safely.

But what’s this got to do with you and your business?

Planning is Everything in Business & Media

Ok it seem’s a little odd that a bunch of dates with “world days” and historic events could mean something to a business but let’s focus on the planning aspect a second. Think back to my recent post about planning a kickstarter campaign, everything was about the data and ensuring that you were aware of events, you knew about other successes and failures and your learned from them. This is kind of the same thing.

With anything in business you want to know that what you are doing is going to have the best chance of success, so you look at what others have done and learn. You may do what Wickes did recently with the launch of the starwars film and attempt to hijack a newstory for your gain – it can really work.

But unless you’ve a fairly big budget maybe attempting to hijack a film is a little out of reach.

Instead the things listed today are events, awareness days, historic activities you can write about, plan things for well in advance. You don’t have to spend a ton of money on them, maybe just create a few graphics for the day for social media, writing articles or having a sale to promote it and engage with the day – drawing attention to it and your business.

If you find something you really engage with and you have a view that differs from others, or a story of your own, speak to a journalist a few weeks or months in advance – don’t ask them the day before the event to cover your item, it’s too late.

It won’t always be easy, there are literally thousands maybe millions of awareness days, so be selective – too much and your audience will ignore you, so be engaging and interesting and of course ensure that they are appropriate to your business.

Top Tip: Yes cover the ones everyone does, things like Small Business Saturday, but also cover strange days that people may not have heard of like national cuddle up day, or to help push sales of a homeless charity calendar we used national homeless day – these aren’t generally top of peoples minds but that’s why they will stand out!

The single best resource I’ve found for (reliable) information of “what happened on this day” is this old clunky bbc website, I’m not sure how long it will float around for though. It’s one of their legacy sites that may get shut down. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday

If you want to get ahead of the game and plan your strategy for marketing grab the 2017 media diary from Janet Murray for £33.35 – its an amazing tool and will really help kickstart your business to growth in 2017.